Visual research material and diffractive readings – a relational research story

Abstract

This article focuses on how the capacity of diffractive readings is put to work in a study of two different types of visual material in research conducted in a preschool. The analysis with the help of –the language of the flat ontology– and the diffractive readings take place in educational research among three-year-olds. Children’s photographs and video recordings produced by the researcher are seen as data that both interfere with and affects the outcome of the study. Diffractive methodologies are used to connect the research and the two kinds of visual data with previous research, some theoretical concepts from Karen Barad’s agential realism and the researcher’s experience of becoming and learning throughout the development of the entangled research process.

Keywords:

• Diffractive readings
• intra-action
• language of the flat ontology
• photographic agency
• visual data

Introduction

The intention in this article is to introduce and display how diffractive readings (Barad, 2007, 2014), as part of an analytical process, are put to work with visual data consisting of video recordings and still photographs. The aim is to offer access points for those who want to conduct diffractive analyses and thereby make some aspects of this open-ended process tangible; a process that connects ethics, ontology and epistemology (Barad, 2007). The work that is presented is based on a more extensive study of the power of photographic gazes in connection with documentation practices in the Swedish preschool (Magnusson, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). In the referenced study, three-year-olds in two different preschools are given an opportunity to use digital cameras in their everyday practices. The cameras are introduced to the children without instructions or rules about how they should be operated or treated. The underlying assumptions and thoughts in the formulation of the research problem are that young children hardly ever get to direct or redirect their photographic gaze – and what is at stake in these gazes – in their everyday lives in the preschool (Lindgren, 2012; Sparrman & Lindgren, 2010).

Methodological and theoretical orientation

Over the past decade, diverse forms of post-qualitative inquiry and aspects of post-qualitative research methods have been used in early childhood research in connection with the theoretical perspectives of new materialism. The researchers’ choice of method of inquiry and methodological approaches has involved and offered new, other and altered ways of producing and analysing data in qualitative research studies carried out with young children in and out of the preschool (Davies, 2014; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Merewether, 2018; Rautio, 2014; Sandvik, 2012). These methodological and theoretical movements enable the children’s everyday perspectives to become visible in ways that are not always possible through the use of verbal language.

In a post-qualitative research approach (St. Pierre, 2011), and also in diffractive methodologies (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), the methodological aspects can be entangled with both a theoretical perspective and the researcher in the production of data and in the alliance with further work on the produced data (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Mazzei, 2014; St. Pierre, 2013, 2018, 2019). St. Pierre (2019) writes that post-qualitative research ‘is methodology-free’ (p. 3), which means that it has the opportunity and capacity to work without pre-existing and planned methods. The study referred to in this article came to imply a movement from a more traditional way of looking at methodology towards a post-qualitative research approach and therby towards a more unpredictable and non-linear way of conducting research using the philosophical and theoretical work of Barad (2003, 2007, 2014) and Lenz Taguchi (2010).

The idea of using diffractive readings (Barad, 2007, 2014) does not mean representing and defining data on the lives of human beings. Rather, it shows the entanglement between non-humans and humans and their ‘material-discursive’ (Barad, 2007, p. 36) relations. The research material thus becomes active in the study, in that the theory and data are not separable, but constitute one another. Here, reformulations and renegotiations of more traditional qualitative methods come into play, where the understanding of what constitutes data and how analyses can be conducted is changed (Davies, 2014; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2013; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013, 2018, 2019; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). What counts as research material can also be performative (Barad, 2007) and ‘in the making’ (St. Pierre, 2018, p. 604), both in the ongoing production of research material and in the analyses conducted throughout a research project. The more traditional idea of a linear process of coding in qualitative research inquiries, what McCoy (2012) describes as ‘(over)simplified’ (p. 762), is therefore disturbed and challenged. In this way, analyses become investigatively entangled with non-linear movements in the analytical process of writing and thinking with the research data. This concerns both the making of data (i.g. production) and the conducting of analyses. In a post-qualitative inquiry, the preparation could be a long-standing relation of an entangled project of ‘reading, thinking, and living with theory’ (St. Pierre, 2018, p. 604). Here, different concepts, rather than a given form or understanding of a methodological approach, can serve as tools in the analyses that are carried out. Lenz Taguchi and St.Pierre (2017) writes: ‘What concept is and what it can do changes from discipline to discipline’ (p. 644 [italics in original]).

In this article about the discipline of educational research, the concepts of diffraction and diffractive readings (Barad, 2007, 2014) are used as active and performative agents with and in-between two kinds of visual research material, namely children’s photographs and the researcher’s recorded video material. The use of diffractive readings, with their focus on both materiality and children, does not ignore the relations between humans in education, but is more about including materiality in these relations by listening to children’s visual voices (Luttrell, 2010) and photographic voices (Magnusson, 2017). In the presented analyses, it is expected that the diffractive readings will do things with the visual material produced in the study and with the researcher. These doings will have an interest in both children and materiality in order to try to explore children’s relations with digital cameras and photography in the preschool context. However, before presenting the visual material produced in the study, I would like to introduce the concept of diffraction, linked to theoretical aspects, besides and together, with the idea of diffractive readings as an analytical tool, in what can be described as an entangled methodological and theoretical onto-epistemological approach. Onto-epistemology or, to quote Barad (2003), ‘onto-epistem-ology’ (p. 829), induces a shift in which knowledge is understood to be created in contemporaneity with all becomings in the world (Barad, 2007, 2014; Davies, 2014; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lenz Taguchi, 2010). These becomings imply that knowledge is not created about the world, but in the world, which makes a sharp distinction between ontology and epistemology otiose. This, in turn, entails changes in the terminology to, for example, relational ontology, post ontology and flat ontology (Barad, 2007; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013; Odegard & Rossholt, 2016).

Diffraction and diffractive readings

In 1992 Donna Haraway wrote The promises of monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. In the text she describes diffraction as a ‘mapping of interference’ (p. 300) and writes that diffraction does not mirror or produce sameness in the way that reflection does, but rather that diffraction maps ‘where the effects of difference appear’ (1992, p. 300). Diffraction, in this sense, does not repeat sameness, but opposes dualism and connects relations and different aspects of the world, amongst humans and non-humans, rather than sets them apart. ‘Diffraction is not merely about differences, and certainly not differences in an absolute sense, but about the entangled nature of differences that matter’ (Barad, 2007, p. 381), this way diffraction opposes traditional habits of reflection (Barad, 2007, 2014; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; Haraway, 1992; Lenz Taguchi, 2010).

One way of explaining diffraction is by comparing them with waves in water (although this also concerns light waves in physics). When sea waves encounter an obstacle or an irregularity of some kind, their movements change. In the sea, a wave movement can last for a long time and then turn when it breaks against a wall or is squeezed through a narrow passage. The wave movements then change and spread in new ways. At the same time, the wave remains a wave; it is the entangled relation in-between the wall, the narrow passage and the wave that create a difference in its pattern and movement. The effect of the diffraction is the change that occurs in the ongoing intra-action between wave movements and passage. Intra-action thus concerns ongoing relations in-between non-humans and humans in the entangled and ongoing movement of living together in the world (Barad, 2007, 2014).

In research and research practice, methodological and theoretical encounters with diffraction ‘[…] make evident the entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the world, including the ontology of knowing’ (Barad, 2007, p. 73). Diffraction makes it possible to trace differences and visualise ‘knowledge-making practices’ (Barad, 2007, p. 72) and make knowledge differently. Davies (2014) writes:

Diffraction as a concept for thinking about analytic processes does not try to fix the analytic process so that it can be turned into a methodic set of steps to be followed. Rather it opens the possibility of seeing how something different comes to matter, not only in the world that we observe but also in our research practice (p. 734).

Moreover, according to Barad (2003, 2007, 2014), a diffractive methodology concerns diffractive readings. She describes them and their capacity by saying: ‘Diffractive readings bring inventive provocations; they are good to think with. They are respectful, detailed, ethical engagements’ (Barad, 2012, p. 50). Diffractive readings also make it possible to re-read different kinds of texts, insights, memories, body-minded experiences and historical contexts through each other as well as besides and together with each other (Barad, 2014, 2017; Davies, 2014; Lenz Taguchi, 2012; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013; Mazzei, 2014; Palmer, 2011; Sehgal, 2014). ‘In fact, diffraction not only brings the reality of entanglement to light, it is itself an entangled phenomenon’ (Barad, 2007, p. 73). The material and human relations concerned can be made visible by making agential cuts (Barad, 2007, 2014) in an ongoing flow of research material. In this way, different aspects of research data come to be connected by cutting data together apart (Barad, 2007, 2014) with other aspects and thereby make previously unknown connections. Agential cuts are a way of seeing events and their entanglement in the world. Barad (2007) describes and understands these as phenomena that ‘are the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra ‘agencies’’ (p. 139).

Blurred relations come into play in a diffractive analysis, in that there is no subject or object per se, and no culture vs. nature. To quote Barad (2007), diffraction is ‘an ethico-onto-epistemological matter’ (p. 381) that concerns all relations – human and non-human – that become together in the world. In earlier research, diffractive readings and diffractive analyses have been used to read different insights, thoughts, memories, experiences, still photographs, websites, theoretical concepts, films and texts (Barad, 2007, 2014; Barnes & Netolicky, 2019; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Ivinson & Renold, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2012; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013; Sauzet, 2015; Taylor & Gannon, 2018) or to plug them into each other (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) and by means of a diffractive analysis ‘emphasiz[e] difference by breaking open the data’ (Mazzei, 2014, p. 743). Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) have used diffractive readings and the concept of ‘diffractive seeing’ (p. 536) to challenge the anthropocentric gaze when approaching photographs of children produced in the preschool. In another example, Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013) use the analytical approach of diffractive readings to understand the anxiety of young women, while Davies (2014) has used it to look at anger in early childhood. Ivinson and Renold (2016) use diffractive methodologies while analysing the discursive and material entanglements in-between girls, cameras and gaze in a school context.

This article looks at the analytical relation in-between diffractive readings and visual research data – still photographs and video data – in educational research in preschool. By using this approach, I tried to make the children’s camera perspectives and their visual voices visible in the context of the preschool. This approach is not based on what we already know, nor is it the only possible approach, but is an attempt to produce knowledge differently about children’s capacities to become part of the camera practices in the preschool.

A performative point of departure

A long time ago, before conducting the study referred to in this article, and before I became a researcher, a child, Elma (not her real name), took part in a pilot study of mine. She said: ‘The camera can see.’ Unwittingly, those words introduced me to a future interest in and choice of theoretical and methodological perspective – although I did not know it at the time. Elma and her peers were introduced to digital cameras when I worked as a preschool teacher. I had invited a group of three-year-olds to use digital cameras as everyday subject/object tools, as well as tools for play. The child, Elma, directed the lens of the camera towards her eye and took a picture of it (Figure 1). She then looked at the lingering photograph in the display and said the words quoted above, ‘the camera can see’. She therefore articulated the digital camera as an active and performative agent that made her world visible and viewable. This short backwards glance to Elma and her entangled relation with the digital camera is central to the following description of the move from ethnography towards aspects of post-qualitative inquiry and diffractive methodologies that took place in the study outlined here.

Figure 1. The eye.

Methodological context, participants, visual material and data production

Atkinson and Morriss (2017) describe and contextualise ethnographic fieldwork by referring to it as producing ‘knowledge-in-action’ (p. 323), rather than looking at it as though research takes place in a vacuum. This idea of producing ‘knowledge-in-action’ is also the starting point in this study. However, the study also moves towards and along a post-qualitative path of inquiry that makes a more traditional qualitative and ethnographic approach wider and blurred due to the use of diffractive readings. As a researcher (in the making), I have carried Elma’s words about the agential power of the camera and its capacity with me and have subsequently developed a theoretical relation with Barad and her agential realism (Barad, 2003, 2007, 2014), with the aid of Lenz Taguchi’s work (Lenz Taguchi, 2010).

I was not aware of what the diffractive readings could do together with the visual material produced as data, but nevertheless tried to ‘stay with the trouble’ as Haraway (2016, p. 31) writes, and with the capacity of the ‘not-known’ (D. Atkinson, 2015, p. 45) and not knowing ‘what to do’ (St. Pierre, 2018, p. 604). However, I did know that there was something here that offered me, my thoughts, the data in the making and the entangled relation in-between us, as well as the becoming of a researcher, something that could be regarded as risky and right, thrilling and irresistible. When I look back, as I am doing now, I feel a strong sense of togetherness with other researchers who have already contributed to making these processes and entangled relations in-between ontology-epistemology and theory-methodology of becoming intelligible (see for example Davies, 2014; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013, 2018, 2019; Taylor & Hughes, 2016).

The original study (Magnusson, 2017, 2018a, 2018b) consisted of 26 children, ten digital cameras, one researcher, eight preschool teachers, two preschool settings, one digital camcorder, ongoing ethical relations and ethical approval from the parents, teachers and children. As the researcher I spent six weeks together with the children, their teachers and all the materiality and material artefacts in their preschool environment (three weeks in each of the two preschool settings). The study took place both indoors and outdoors and amounted to 70 hours of video data recorded by the researcher and about 2,200 photographs taken by the children. The video and photographic data that was produced is in focus in the analyses. Moreover, the visual data was entangled with aspects of place and space and with all the matter, theory and material relations that took place in the study and in the work that was conducted after the visual data had been produced. The use of a camcorder to produce research data made it possible to repeatedly return to the data to discover and re-examine events (Fleer & Ridgeway, 2014; Sørensen, 2014; Sparrman, 2005) and look at the children’s use of and directions in the photography and the photographic gazes in the making.

When I first met the children in the two preschool settings, they were told that I was interested in what they were doing in those settings. I invited them to use the digital cameras by showing them a small basket where the easy-to-use cameras, with big display screens, were stored. The introduction and presentation of possible camera usage were deliberately kept open and no instructions were given about what to depict or how to use the equipment. I (simply) followed, and answered, questions from the children, rather than told them what to do.

The visual material in the study was produced by the participating children using the digital cameras based on the question: What are you doing here in your preschool? However, the production of data was also generated by the researcher (operating a handheld digital camcorder) following the children, the cameras and their entangled doings. When the children and the cameras were close to my physical body and the camcorder, I both knelt and sat on the floor indoors and on the ground outdoors in an attempt to make the researcher’s double-force-gaze reachable for the children’s eyes and the optics and lenses of the digital cameras. This double-gaze consisted of the researcher’s gaze and that of the camcorder, together with the data production and a performative combination of these gazes and aspects of ethics in the making. In this way, ethics and aspects of children’s rights to become photographic onlookers (Sparrman & Lindgren, 2010) in the preschool become an entangled part of the data production and the diffractive readings with data later on.

The analytical process – entangled relations

In the following, and at one level, the diffractive readings and the act of cutting together apart are described as methodological steps. The diffractive readings did not work with the data in this way, but instead were subjected to processes of ‘differential becoming’ (Barad, 2007, p. 382). The described steps should therefore be seen and perceived as transformative movements, rather than steps in a metaphorical staircase.

The analytical work of plugging (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) the different types of visual data material into each other and being able to analytically ‘cut them together-apart’ (Barad, 2014, p. 168) started during the production of the data in the two preschool settings in which the study was conducted. Here, theoretical thinking and the production of the data worked in tandem and the diffractive readings were initiated when the researcher, holding the camcorder, followed the children and the digital cameras and the entangled relations they performed, produced, experienced, and made visually seen or unseen. When I, as the researcher, took part in the visual events that occurred around me and with me, I whispered into the camcorder and thereby interlaced linguistic field notes into the visual data material (some traditional field notes with pen on paper were also made in the study during the data production). Here, some aspects of the children’s relations with the digital cameras and their ways of making the world photographically visible emerged. These whispered notes became a first, initial, yet vigorous performative aspect of the analysis that illuminated things and events that seemed to glimmer and glow (MacLure, 2010), which made the researcher’s gaze and intention turn and re-turn to these things in the data. The diffractive readings thereby partially designed themselves along the way and also started to take part in the study as performative forces that made different parts of the data intelligible to other parts (cf. Barad, 2007, 2014; Mazzei, 2014; Somerville, 2016). Further effects of glimmer also emerged in the meetings in-between the visual material (the still photographs and video data) later on during the analysis. These further effects in the diffractive readings extended the analytical thinking to also include the question: What makes these aspects and events in the visual data glimmer and glow? Is it because they meet expectations and reflect previous research? In this respect, the analytical use of diffractive readings made recurring turns and re-turns to the verbal as well as the visual data, both during the production of the data and during the diffractive readings later on. Thereby, the analytical work and the diffractive readings proceeded as a complex, explorative, non-linear, messy and entangled process (Barad, 2014; Davies, 2014, 2017; Lenz Taguchi, 2012; Mazzei, 2014) that continued until the study was formulated and (in one way) captured as a PhD thesis.

A second part of the performative force in the diffractive readings, and thereby the analytical work with the aid of diffractive readings, was the everyday re-encounter with the visual data that had been produced during the day. Every evening throughout the six weeks the analytical work continued after the day’s production at the site. Every day I perused the video data and the children’s photographs. Here, creative and tentative ideas about the connections in-between the different aspects of the visual material emerged by performing agential cuts (Barad, 2007). The different types of visual material were read through in tandem. They were cut together apart as affective forces with the aid of the diffractive readings (Barad, 2007, 2014). Here, new glimmering aspects of the photographs emerged that led to the formulation of new questions, such as, for example, how the blurred photographs connected to the video data and the linguistic field notes. Both the blurred and razor-sharp aspects of the photographs on the digital cameras’ memory cards made ‘matter-in-the-process-of-becoming’ (Barad, 2007, p. 179) seen or not seen. One example of this is the photo in Figure 2, where two fingers covers most of the lens, thereby leaving a skin-coloured blur that indicates that someone is behind the camera. This behindness is essential in that it stands in sharp contrast to the other photographs displayed on the preschool’s walls. In those photographs, we do not know who was behind the camera at the time.

Figure 2. Skin-coloured blur.

Another way of looking at this photo (Figure 2) is that it describes aspects of the capacity in the diffractive readings. In the analyses it can be seen as a picture with fingers covering the lens of the camera, although it can also be seen as a picture in the making in the video data produced during the study. The fingers can thus be seen from another and at the same time entangled perspective as something else, as a differential becoming or becoming differently (Barad, 2007), as fingers pointing somewhere, or in the performative action of moving from here to there. Such movements or shifts in the video data show, for example, a finger pointing at a close friend who was to be depicted. On another occasion, a finger is on its way to indicating a central spot on the reading room floor.

The language of the flat ontology

The third part of the analytical work with the diffractive readings took place after leaving the two preschool settings. The analyses started to evolve and expand when they were connected as intra-active agencies (Barad, 2003, 2007, 2014) to previous research, the researcher’s experience of working in the preschool, ethics and the purpose of the study. All these aspects were also connected to a deeper and renewed relationship with the theoretical and analytical capacity of linking different parts of the data with others.

In order to describe, tell and dress the visual data in words, I developed what became conceptualised as the capacity of ‘the language of the flat ontology’ (Magnusson, 2017, p. 262). This language illuminated and highlighted the children’s acting and agency in their ongoing relations with digital cameras and with ethics as an entangled aspect of relationships in-between the children, the preschool, the photography, the cameras and the researcher. The language of the flat ontology developed from an onto-epistemological approach (Barad, 2003, 2007, 2014) in which both matter and humans became performative forces in the data. The use of this conceptualised language became the fourth and the most deepened analytical tool in the apparatus of the diffractive reading. This part of the analytical work was immersed in an alliance with the work of others, whose research and theoretical/methodological development made it possible to work without pre-planned (analytical) methods (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2013; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013).

The performing forces in the two types of visual data could, with the aid of a language of a flat ontology, be written like this: ‘[…] fingertips touch the camera and move to the top of it. The fingertips then push down buttons, and the buttons move up and down as part of the ongoing in-between […]’ (Magnusson, 2017, p. 262). In this way of writing and analytically formulating the ongoing world, the fingertips of a human become as active as the movement of the buttons on the digital camera. In other words, the button of a camera (matter) can be as performative as the activity of a child (human), and where the camera and its photographic capacity become performative forces in the hands of a three-year-old. Moreover, at the same time, the child becomes a performative force in the hand of a digital camera in terms of what their entangled relations can make seen and unseen. Wording like this, as part of the analytical approach, does not try to make the data seen from the side. Instead, the language of the flat ontology aspires to make aspects of the ongoing relations seen. In this way, visual data is not waiting to be analysed as though it had captured reality, but rather produces reality in an onto-epistemological sence (Barad, 2007, 2014; Ivinson & Renold, 2016; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; MacLure, 2013).

Capacity of the analytical force – the diffractive readings and the language of the flat ontology

One of the aspects of vigour, as well as being an affective force in the use of diffractive readings, is how what is made seen in one analysis in the ongoing analytical work makes it possible to read and re-read other parts of the data through already performed analyses. Affect in this sense is not emotions, but rather the forces and intensities (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013; Hickey-Moody, 2013; Hickey-Moody & Crowley, 2010; Semetsky, 2006) that become visible in the visual data by making agential cuts. After the analytical work of cutting the visual data, together-apart, and connecting and reconnecting different parts of it with previous research and theoretical aspects in line with Barad’s agential realism (2003, 2007, 2014), the work entered a new phase. Here, the writing of different parts of the visual data, together with the aid of the flat ontology language described above, turned the analytical work into new relations where the researcher, other humans, matter and theoretical becomings changed and followed the new and renewed entangled relations and their movements.

In one of the two preschools there is a child and a red car (Figures 3 and 4) and an intense love woven into their relationship.

Figure 3. The car.

Figure 4. The recognisable gaze.

The red car, the child, a digital camera, material and discursive relations are at the centre of the following narrative from the study. It is an example of how to make a visual event seen as text using the language of the flat ontology. This narrated example is followed by analyses of three different aspects of this visual event in the data and three aspects of what the diffractive readings could or did do in the work that was carried out.

A hand is ensconced in the pocket of a jacket. Enclosed in the hand is a red car. The small, red, toy car’s metallic and plastic surface rests in an entangled motionless relation with the skin of the warm hand. The grip is hard and the car responds with its plastic and metallic resistance of matter. Sometimes the car rests, as now, enclosed by a hand and its pressure in the pocket of a jacket and sometimes in the pocket of a pair of trousers. It also pops up in an open hand outside the pocket, and then moves in entangled relations with the hand of a child. It runs or flies along with the sandpit and the ground outdoors or with floors, tables and walls indoors. The car has a name. It is Lightning McQueen. The child has a name. It is Jack. The other children in the preschool also know the car and talk with their bodies, movements and voices to each other and with Jack about it. Two educators working in the department talk on several occasions about the car when it is visible in hand or play. They say: ‘Put it into your pocket’. ‘Remove it’. ‘You can put it on the shelf’. A voice from a teacher, in the direction of Jack and the car, also says that if Jack loses it, he only has himself to blame!

The hand that previously enclosed the car in the pocket of a jacket now encloses a digital camera. They approach a table together. Around the table are beads that turn into necklaces, moving bodies and voices that intra-act with the pink clay on the table. An educator is crouching next to the children and the clay. The camera in the hand of Jack is motionless and produces no sound or lets in any light. Jack’s empty right hand moves into the pocket of the jacket and soon the red car lies visible in the open hand. The gaze in the eyes of Jack switches between the car, the camera, the clay, the surface of the table, the peers and the educator. We hear Jack’s voice. It asks the teacher to stretch the palm of her hand towards the camera and the car in order for them, the entangled child-camera, to take a photograph. The educator looks at Jack, the car, the camera, the other children and then slowly extends an open palm towards the car, digital camera and their expectation.

The camera is now enclosed by two hands; it is raised, the fingers move with the buttons. The body moves sideways led by the framing in the display of the camera and the car at its centre. Around the table, one step forward, one back, a body in motion with a camera. A camera in motion with a body and the framing in the display of the camera. The red car is the centre of it all.

A first analysis of this red-car-child-camera-event concerns the more traditional power relations that are at play between the teacher and the child. A second analysis relates to what can be made seen by re-reading another event through this first analysis. A third analysis has references to visual and popular culture. Here the analyses are ‘re-turning as in turning […] over’ they thereby make ‘new temporalities’ (Barad, 2014, p. 168) by spreading new patterns of difference. At first, a teacher stretches her palm towards the red car, the photographic capacity and the photographic agency of a digital camera in the hands of a child. This action collides with the regulation of no personal toys being allowed in this preschool that is at stake in-between the preschool and the children. We could perhaps say that the research situation, together with the different types of camera and the strong relationship in-between the car and the child, shook the conventional construction of power and regulations in the preschool and made it messy.

The second part of this red-car-child-camera-event is how the analysis described above became a scattered pattern of diffractive possibilities for how other analyses could be read. In the first analysis I saw regulations, a toy with popular culture references and the love and joy in the relation in-between a child and a toy. These things were easy to define against a more traditional practice in the preschool (Dolk, 2013). However, when some of the other children taking part in the study produced photographs of a small hole in an outhouse in the playground, I did not know what to make of this camera-hole-child-relation. Here I was the one without knowledge. It then occurred to me to use the capacity and affective force of being and becoming in the already identified relations in the first analysis. By using this approach, and with the help of the diffractive readings, I was able to follow the effects of the knowledge-making practices (Barad, 2007) in the children’s visual interests.

The children already had a relation with and an interest in the hole on the wall, holes in the sand, or in the bark of a tree. When looking at other parts of the visual data I found that the children were concerned about and entangled in hole relations. For example, they dug holes and refiled holes that seemed to be asking to be filled with sand or leaves. I had to understand that these were relations that I did not know about; that this was the capacity of the not-known (D. Atkinson, 2015). So, when I looked at and followed the hole as though it had the affective force of the red car, it showed me something new, which to me was identifiable as the material force of a hole in the children’s daily lives in the educational context of preschool. The material force of the hole could, for example, show how the children came close to some aspects in the content knowledge of mathematics in terms of abstract and hypothetical thinking (Bishop, 1988) – here appearing as exploring volume and mass when digging and refilling holes.

By using diffractive readings, one analysis made another one seen (in terms of looking at the video material and then at the photographs and vice versa). When I looked at the video data, I saw children taking photos of the back of the outhouse in the playground, but had no idea what it was that interested them. In the framing capacity of their entangled camera interest, there were no remaining photographs to look at, only blurred greyness. This meant that I had to move back and forth between reading the different parts of visual data. In other words, I had to plug them into each other again and again by following the movements and collisions created by the enacted agential cuts in the material.

The third analysis concerned my (researcher-former-preschool-teacher-private-person) visual references. I was unable to let go of the red car and the returned gaze in the eyes of this car (Figure 4). I woke up at night thinking about it. I then discovered that it was an affective force concerning preschool children in other researchers’ data (see, for example, Sandvik, 2015). I also knew that I had seen it somewhere else. I therefore conducted a picture search on the internet, where I found the visual marketing material promoting the film that was the home of this red car. There I recognised the gaze and the squint! This capacity in the diffractive reading that concerned the researcher, her personal and professional visual references and the visual data made the analysis take a renewed turn. Was it possible that the child in question had made his visual and popular culture references seen when using visualisation strategies to make the red car seen?

Diffractive readings are about making knowledge differently, about making other things than you first saw seen and about breaking data open (Barad, 2007, 2014; Haraway, 1992; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010). In the above descriptions of the analyses, no attempt is made to convince a reader that this is a static result or a given result. On the contrary, this is a way of following the capacity of the diffractive readings as an open-ended process. By showing them and their entangled wandering and nomadic (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013) drifting, the intention is to describe the analytical movements of the diffractive readings during the conducted research (by looking at the entangled meeting in-between the types of visual data and thereby make matter, humans and their relations seen). The use of diffractive readings in the analytical work with the visual data connects different parts of the data by enacting agential cuts (Barad, 2007, 2014). These cuts renew and reorientate former assumptions and ideas by ‘[…] iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew […]’ (Barad, 2014, p. 168). All patterns and all participants matter, in that they connect in the production of data and later on in the analytical process of making a research story together with data. These research stories include ways of reliving the relations in the visual material and of formulating the visual material in words. In this way, the capacity of the diffractive readings also shows the children’s visual perspectives as aspects of democracy from within the education system in which they take part.

Concluding remarks

Rather like waves following and colliding with each other, applying diffractive readings in the analytical work contributes to one analysis following another and allows an analysis to become through an earlier one. By using diffractive readings, the analyses have the capacity to move back and forth and do not only include already produced visual data, but also the ongoing data production. As a result of constructing the (entangled) analytical apparatus that makes use of diffractive readings – which in itself is diffractive (Barad, 2007, 2014), I, as the researcher, am able to ‘read’ the children’s photographs together with the video data. These entanglements, where theory, production of data, data analysis and methodology work together in the diffractive readings, make aspects of the children’s perspectives and photographic articulations visible from a new or more complex angle. Here, working with the help of ‘the language of the flat ontology’ came to play a central role. This also began to make those participants who were previously not seen or imagined visible in the daily practice of the preschool, such as drawing attention to who was behind the camera in the daily activities and in the practice of compiling visual documentation in the preschool (Sparrman & Lindgren, 2010; Sparrman & Lindgren, 2010).

By getting inspired of post-qualitative research modes, and by applying and using new materialistic research entanglements and diffractive readings, not only do people and their actions emerge in the analyses, but there is also a strong focus on the digital cameras, the camcorder, the place, ethical aspects, all matter and the children’s and the researcher’s gazes. They are therefore all regarded as active and performing material-discursive forces (Barad, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2010) that take place in the analyses and that contribute to the production of knowledge. Here new aspects of the preschool, the use of digital cameras, the children’s visual relations and their partaking in visual culture are seen as becoming in the world. The production of knowledge can contribute to revised understandings of the world and the life that is lived there, as well as presenting ways of following the changed trajectories produced by the children and their competences and capacities.

Following the camera-child and his/her photographic agency – with each child’s permission – and the agency of the photographs puts me in a position in which it becomes clear that not only the cameras and what they depict in their ongoing child-camera-relation make the world seen, but also how the framing in the display does the same thing. In the process of writing and thinking with theory, as well as in the analysis, I became able to talk about a visual voice and a photographic voice. The concept of photographic voice is a way of describing and trying to connect the different kinds of data with the world in which it becomes data to the involved and interwoven aesthetic, ethical and democratic aspects of the study. The ethics, democracy and aesthetics aspects make way for new connections in research about the preschool. It should also be noted that these aspects take place in other research writings in other places in the past (Magnusson, 2017, 2018a, 2018b), as well as in the future becomings of new research stories.

The voices (and gazes) that I refer to in the article should not be confused with the idea of an authentic human voice imparting truths. It is not one solid voice (or one solid gaze) that exists only within a person, and it is not a voice (or gaze) that conveys lived human experience (see Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2013; Lenz Taguchi, 2010). These voices can instead be understood as mutual becomings along with other visual and photographic voices and gazes in the visual material concerning the everyday practices and ethics of becoming a child in a preschool setting. Carlsen (2018) uses the concept of ‘expanded text’ (p. 6) when she includes visual data in an ethnographic study. In this article, and in my research, I have tried to expand the visual by the use of diffractive readings and the language of the flat ontology. Allowing visual entanglements to become text and thereby allowing them to become readable in the context of texts expands the visual data as becoming text.

Using diffractive reading as a way of interpreting the data with the approach presented in this article can disturb preschool teachers’ (and researchers’) assumptions about what is or could be essential and what is in focus for young children in preschool. Although the study I refer to here is encapsulated in a certain way, the analyses continue each time I discuss, intra-act and (bodily)touch the visual material in the study, so that ‘[…] data becomes new data […]’ (Thomas, 2016, p. 42) over and over again. The diffractive readings have no end; they are part of an ongoing entangled event that creates new capacities and new becomings.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lena O. Magnusson

Lena O. Magnusson holds a PhD. in Arts Education and works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Education in the University of Gavle, SWEDEN.